World Misogyny Day is coming, and it's beautiful! Women, girls, cover up. Hide your femininity, hide who you are, because savages cannot control their carnal appetites! Do it and like it! Embrace the hate! Celebrate the most extreme, brutal and misogynistic ideology on the face of the earth!

When is their day? When will anyone stand in solidarity with them? Those who taunt or brutalize hijab-wearing women are louts and creeps, and should be prosecuted if they commit any acts of violence. At the same time, the women who don't wear hijab in Muslim countries are far more likely to be victims of violence than hijabis in the West. Who speaks for them?

I don't remember if Ayaan shares her thoughts about wearing the hijab in her first book, but I just ran across some in Nomad. If you have read Infidel, you will know that by age 20, Ayaan had been wearing the full hijab for four years, so she's been there, done that, and speaks from first-hand experience:

I found myself standing on Whitechapel Road, the center of the largest Muslim population in Great Britain.... On the pavement beside me, standing at the bus stop outside the hospital steps, was a collection of women wearing every variety of Muslim covering imaginable, from a pastel headscarf to the complete, thick black niqaab that covers you completely, with a veil of black cloth that blanks out your face, even your eyes. These were young, strong women, not doddering old ladies; some of them were pregnant, most of them had several small children, and they were out shopping for their families in the sunlight. Several wore a variation that was new to me: in addition to a long robe and headscarf they had an extra face veil fixed on with Velcro, with two thick black strips of cloth strapped so as to leave barely an inch or so uncovered, just skirting the eyelashes....

Seated outside a halal fast-food shop was a small woman in a long black robe with a black embroidered beak of cloth tied over her nose and mouth, in the style of Algerian women. Two small children were crying in the buggy beside her, and she was trying to jiggle and comfort them while she lifted her cloth beak to try to eat her pastry modestly underneath it. Her older toddler was wearing a veil too. It was not a face veil, but it covered her hair and shoulders; it was white and lacy and elasticized so it fit snugly over her head. The child couldn't have been older than three.

Two shop fronts farther down was a huge mosque, the biggest mosque in London.... All these people had left their countries of origin only to band together here, unwilling or unable to let go, where they enforced their culture more strongly even than in Nairobi. Here was the mosque, like a symbolic magnetic north, the force that moved their women to cover themselves so ferociously, the better to separate themselves from the dreadful influence of the culture and values of the country where they have chosen to live.

It was just a glimpse, and yet I felt an instant sense of panic and suffocation. I was right back in the heart of it all: inside the world of veils and blinkers, the world where women must hide their hair and their bodies, must cower to eat in public, and must follow a few steps behind their men on the street.

A web of values — of honor and shame and religion — still entangled me together with all those women at the bus stop and almost every other woman along Whitechapel Road that morning. We were all very far from where we had been born, but only I had left behind that culture. They had brought their web of values with them, half way across the world....

If a man's women stray from submission, they damage him: his good name, his authority, the sense that he is loyal and strong and true to his word. This belief is part of a larger one that individuals don't matter, that their choices and desires are meaningless, particularly if the individuals are women. This sense of honor and male entitlement drastically restricts women's choices.

A whole culture and its religion weigh down every Muslim, but the heaviest weight falls disproportionately on women's shoulders. We are bound to obey and bound to chastity and shame by Allah and the Prophet and by the fathers and husbands who are our guardians. The women along Whitechapel Road carry the burdens of all the obligations and religious rules that in Islam focus so obsessively on women, as surely as their counterparts in East Africa....

The Muslim veil, the different sorts of masks and beaks and burkas, are all gradations of mental slavery. You must ask permission to leave the house, and when you do go out you must always hide yourself behind thick drapery. Ashamed of your body, suppressing your desires — what small space in your life can you call your own?

The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex....

These days in Britain, as all over Europe, Muslim women are demanding that they be allowed to wear the hijab at work. More and more wear the full niqaab, which covers even your face and eyes. These women believe that their own bodies are so powerfully toxic that even making eye contact with other people is a sin. The extent of self-loathing that this expresses is impossible to exaggerate, and it must be reawakened every time it meets the conflicting urge to work, to go out of the home, to encounter the outside world....

As we drove down Whitechapel Road I felt anger that this subjugation is silently tolerated, if not endorsed, not just by the British but by so many Western societies where the equality of the sexes is legally enshrined.

I will share more excerpts from this book in a future article, once I finish reading the entire book.

In my mind, the issue isn't a matter of being pro-hijab or anti-hijab. If you want to wear one, then be free to do so. But for those who don't want to wear one, they should be free not to. Unfortunately, there are millions of Muslim women around the world who suffer psychologically and physically — and are even murdered — just because they don't want to cover up as their male relatives, their culture, their religion, and Allah demand.

It is World Hijab Day! Women of the world, show your submission to Islam, males, and Allah by covering up! Today you have a choice — tomorrow you may not be so fortunate.